Don't Count Your Friends Until They Confirm...

Hello, Blog Readers! I am writing this message from the Future! It's 2009 here. Whereas, only a day or so ago, it was still 2008. 2009 seemed so far away and yet, here we are. In this future, Barack Obama is president for most of the year. George Bush Jr. was an eight-year long fart that people are flapping towels at, to chase it away. 2008 was a terribly long election process, that seemed oppresively hopeless at times. 2009 is the promise of possibility. The pre-show, warm-up to the space-age, futuristic utopia of 2010. I plan to be driving my solar-powered, hybrid Toyota in 2010 to my new job in the Lake Michigan Windmill Farm. Good times. Good times, indeed.

In the meantime, before things radically improve for the better, I, like so many people of the worlds, am trolling around the Facebook, poking old friends and commiting fictional crimes in Mafia Wars. As I feared it would, Facebook has swallowed me almost entirely for a week now. Tearing myself away to come blog here and/or get some actual work done, has been a chore. But with the office empty today and my boss gone until Monday, today is a little less frenetic. A good day for online playtime.

I thought I might share my thoughts on the Facebook, here in my quaint, retro-inspired blog (Blogging is so 1995, you know?) I'm still very much a Facebook virgin and I'm wandering around in its busy interiors, wide-eyed and naive to every new experience. Here's what I think of it all...

Facebook is fucking unnatural. It defies the ordinary stream of time and experience that we all live in. We age. We move cities. We make new friends. We leave old friends behind. We forgive ourselves for our past mistakes. We get permission to make new ones.

Not of Facebook, you don't.

Facebook is a giant cocktail party where every person you ever met, with access to the internet, is waiting to reconnect with you.

Your current co-worker? He's there.
Your childhood best friend? He's there too.
The girl whose breasts you spent the better part of your senior year trying to get a peel at? She's there too. (and her fantastic middle-age cleavage is also there in her pics.)
The kid you went to Summer Camp with? He's there.
The guy who snapped you on the ass with a towel in the locker room of football practice? He's there too.
People you don't possibly remember at all are also there and they're curious to hear what you've been up to, these last 15 years.

And condensing a decade and a half of life into a single 1000 letter wall posting is a humbling exercise in self-censorship. You mention the moves, the jobs, the pets, the kids and the marriages. You don't mention the boozy nights, the burlesque shows, the half-decade of improv, the near-misses and the parade of failed relationships. It turns out that you can really summarize your life, if you remove all of the nuance and context.

All of these people from your life, the friends, the lovers, the mates, the best friends, the acquaintances and the absolutely forgotten are mingling in this gigantic cocktail party, making their own connections in strange and un-natural ways. Change your status to mention the deli sandwich you just had your improv buddy mentions your big fat belly and the guy who used to date your sister says that you were a fatty in middle school too. And the shame of the consensus of disapproval from the various sub-strata of your past is overwhelmed by the sheer wrongness that your improv buddy in this state is conversing about you to someone you last saw twenty years ago! These people should not be meeting! Their only common denominators are you, your waist-line and Fucking Facebook.

As I said before, Facebook is wholly unnatural. It defies distance and time, by linking together people who should never be linked together and turning the normally linear time line of your life into a single mish-mash, flea-market with absolutely no criteria by which people are re-allowed back into your life. They just are. Because they can be.

And this gigantic, electronic swap-meet isn't just populated by actual people. Fictional characters are allowed in the door too. Not as user profiles, but as "Fan Sites", where you can adore our modern celebrities and get updates on their activities. Currently, I'm a fan of "Philip J. Fry" from Futurama, Batman and the Swamp Thing.

The Swamp Thing. And I get updates, when he comes lumbering up out of the Florida swamps to tell me that he's making a cameo appearance in the latest issue of "Teen Titans" and I probably shouldn't miss it.

Only on Facebook, man.

But lest this entire entry sound like a totally anti-Facebook rant, there are some good things to come out of my short time in this particular social network. Here's three good things to come from Facebook...

1.) My profile picture is deceptively sexy and bad-ass. I get crazy compliments on it, all the time. Which I'm fine with. Turn the lights up and that dark and sinister man, actually looks like somebody's dad, who could probably use a few hundred sit-ups. And a hairpiece. The profile pic, though, allows me to maintain the illusion and I'm down with that.

2.) I am now about to intimately track the romantic relationships of every person that I have any sort of interest in, instantaneously. If I think you're the least bit cute and you're within driving distance to me and your relationship changes from "In A Relationship" to "It's Complicated" or better yet, "Single", I am going to pay more attention to you. That's all. What? You thought I was going to ask these girls out or something? Right after they got out of a relationship? No way. I'm going to lay the groundwork now and be the much more attractive, better option, later down the road.
Jeez, what kind of a skeevy jerk did you take me for?

3.) The other good thing to come out of Facebook is my near total immersion into the online, members game, "Mafia Wars". I love it. I've created an online, alter ego, Carlo "Sticky Moustache" Gambrano. (Long-time readers will probably recognize where that nickname came from.) I rob banks. I knock over museums. I whack mafia guys. I own property. I outfit gang members with vehicles and weapons. I fight other mobsters. It's a blast.
And The Turk, Ron and two other guys I "know" from Facebook are playing it with me.

One of those guys is a guy that I used to know in high school and haven't seen in 16 years. He's back home in Louisville. I think he has kids now. We haven't really gotten to know each other very well in Real Life, but in the game, we're in the same gang. He asks me questions. I answer as best as I can. When I see his energy is low, I shoot him an Energy Pak. We hardly know each other, but we're playing this game together. And because he joined my crime family, I was able to buy a restaurant that actually makes me a lot of money. So, i feel genuine, In Real Life, gratitude to this person, who is far away from me, both temporally and geographically.

I would also be a cold, heartless bastard if I didn't mention that Facebook has brought me in connection with some really wonderful adults that I only previously knew in their larval stages in high school. We were all a-holes, dweebs and dipshits in high school. In the interim, 15 plus years, we've all shed our awkward, doofus goofus exteriors and become fully-rounded adults. Or at least adults, capable of mating and popping out offspring. Which changes EVERYONE'S perspective. Facebook allows me to re-connect with these people and these are the pockets of the cocktail party where I find myself lingering, posting to walls and sifting through picture albums. Enjoying the good lives of people that I now appreciate more fully.

I avoided Facebook for so long. Now that I'm here, yes, my productivity in my blog and work has slowed. Yes, I am befuddled by Friend Requests by people with the most obscure connection to me. Yes, I am coming across ex-girlfriends. Yes, I am talking to people who make me a little uncomfortable. But by and large, the experience has been a good one. I am enjoying myself. I am glad I signed up for it.

Now, if you'll excuse me, Finis the Consigliere and Joey The Turk and I have to plant a car-bomb under Don Corlaone's car. That lousy bastard has stolen the name of a venerated brother of La Cosa Nostra and MISSPELLED it. For this slight, he must be punished and he will meet a temporary oblivion in a fire-storm, when he starts up the keys of his car. In the way back from the job, the boys and I might mix it up with a Haitian gang or take a quiz to see which member of "The Office" cast, we are most compatible with. I'm hoping for Jim, but I'll probably get Andy. Whatever. As long as it's not Dwight.

Cheers,
Mr.B